Episode 4: Derailment

Laurie: In late 2024, a year’s worth of rain fell on the Valencia region in Spain. It was one of the deadliest disasters in the country’s history. But it wasn’t just tragedy that made this event stand out. It showed that as the climate crisis escalates, a new and destructive type of politics is emerging …

Archival: “Una catástrofe natural que marcó nuestra historia…”

Archival: “…more than 200 people died…”

Archival: "...making this Europe's worst weather disaster in five decades…"

Archival: “Solo pedimos ayuda!”

Laurie: Climate change had supercharged the floods. But this didn’t act as a wakeup call, as you might expect and hope. Instead, the floods ended up boosting climate deniers. And that raises a question, one critical to how the world might navigate 1.5 overshoot… Can societies cope with the fallout while still cutting emissions? Put another way, how do we stop the consequences of climate change disrupting our ability to tackle the causes of climate change? … In Spain, at first, the response was remarkable. After the floods, came a deluge of volunteers to help clean up the mess. The destruction also became part of the now-constant stream of news about climate-driven calamity. This is feeding a consistent and growing trend of public concern worldwide. We could think of this like a self-correcting mechanism: the worse climate change gets, the louder the call for change. But that’s not what happened in Spain.

Archival: “…asesino…asesino…asesino…”

Laurie: Valencia had experienced similar floods before. But not as deadly. And the blame couldn’t be pinned on climate change alone. This was also a story of political failure. Meteorologists sounded the alarm, but the regional government fumbled the response. In a surreal moment, Valencia’s president appeared on television to reassure locals that the storm was easing, even as it worsened … So, when the skies cleared, frustration surged. And the people in charge got the brunt of the blame, including the Spanish king …

Archival: “…they were throwing mud in some cases, I mean that is unheard of, throwing mud at a king…”

Archival: “…people have really blamed the system, the authorities for the slow response but also the really late warnings…”

Laurie: Amid this turmoil, something unexpected happened. Vox, a political party, used the disaster to promote its scepticism of climate action. Now that seems like an absurd contradiction … In the wake of a deadly disaster partly driven by climate change, the Vox politicians were arguing for less action on climate change. Their leader, Santiago Abascal, falsely claimed that the floods weren’t supercharged by rising temperatures. The real culprit, he insisted, was “climate fanaticism”. Climate policies were to blame. His story was that environmentalists’ desire to let rivers flow freely had led to the demolition of dams, which left communities exposed to surging rivers. Now, this isn’t true. The only structure dismantled anywhere nearby was a small, outdated lock, many years before the disaster. Nothing that would’ve made the floods worse. But in a moment thick with grief, this didn’t matter. People were angry, and Vox exploited that anger. After the floods, polls showed their support growing. And they used that support to push for less climate action. But this tactic isn’t unique to Spain. It’s part of an emerging global playbook … Welcome back to Overshoot. My name is Laurie Laybourn. And this is episode four, Derailment.

Chapter 2

Laurie: It starts with a critical feature of our age. Across the world, trust in politicians is low. This creates the conditions for disasters to become politically explosive, as the devastation is easily blamed on those in charge. Meanwhile, politicians in opposition – including those opposed to climate action – fan the flames. To do this, they often lie. They spread misinformation. But the outcome is that they make more political capital from climate disasters than do climate advocates. The US is another example. A few months after the Valencia floods, as Los Angeles was devastated by wildfires, Donald Trump downplayed the clear role of climate change. Instead, he claimed the scale of the disaster was down to environmentalism. Specifically, the policy of local Democrat politicians to protect a rare fish species called Smelt by stopping the over-pumping of rivers.

Archival: “…and for the sake of a Smelt, they have no water. They have no water in the fire hydrants today in Los Angeles. It was a terrible thing…”

Laurie: None of this is true. But it’s the same type of argument that Abascal used in Spain. And, like Abascal, Trump set about using his power to roll back climate action. He promised to dismantle FEMA, the government’s emergency response agency, while also pledging to increase the US’s carbon emissions. Both will make people in LA less safe. But more disasters will also mean more mistrust and anger. And that means more opportunities to win political influence - and to dismantle climate action. Which will lead to more disasters. That’s a vicious cycle; a doom loop. This is known as ‘derailment risk’, the danger that the worsening consequences of climate change could undermine action to tackle its causes. If that happens at a large enough scale, then the world could be kept off - could be derailed from - a course that avoids the very worst. It’s like our ship in a storm, the one we’ve come back to throughout this series to understand 1.5 overshoot. The ship’s crew must deal with the chaotic impacts of the storm. But these impacts could get in the way of navigating. Which means the ship then heads further into the storm and so the impacts get worse, bringing more distractions … And as the world overshoots 1.5, something similar could happen. Breaking this doom loop is one of the biggest challenges now facing the world. The key is building resilience, just like strengthening a ship to weather a storm. In climate terms, this is often called ‘adaptation’. Like building flood barriers and heat-proofing buildings. More adaptation can make societies more resilient to disasters. Which could mean less chaos and anger coming in their wake, and so fewer opportunities for anti-climate politicians to derail action. But nearly all governments aren’t investing enough in adaptation. Some simply can’t afford to do it. And that means that they're getting stuck in another example of the derailment doom loop. Responding to disasters drains resources, making it harder to invest in adaptation, which makes the next disaster even more costly, which means less adaptation, and so on … But even wealthy countries aren’t investing enough. Take the UK, for example.

Baroness Brown: “…we can see almost on a daily basis that we're not well adapted to climate change today…”

Laurie: That’s Baroness Julia Brown. She leads the body that advises the UK government on how to be better prepared for climate impacts. For years, the government has been making promises and plans about being better climate-prepared. But there is a large and growing gap between those promises and reality.

Baroness Brown: “…not only are we not well adapted today, but in many areas, we aren't really even on track with planning…in some areas, we don't even seem to be planning to be prepared for the changes in climate that are coming. And yet we know they are coming.”

Laurie: This is a problem all over the world. It’s called the ‘adaptation gap’, the widening divide between what governments need to do to keep people safe, and what’s actually being done. The more the adaptation gap grows, the more vulnerable people will be, and the more destructive disasters will become, leading to more mistrust and anger, as the gap between what politicians promise and what is happening grows. Even those political leaders who support decarbonisation have often failed to invest in adaptation. They keep making lots of promises and plans. But they’re not followed with enough action. Even as the world overshoots 1.5C and the danger escalates, this is still happening. And it’s getting absurd. Because some governments are now even claiming they have plans to adapt to a 4C temperature rise. Like the French government, which in March 2025 published its climate adaptation plan. Here’s a news report from the time.

Archival: “…what the government is saying is that we cannot rule out the possibility that the country will hit the four degrees uh warming uh Mark and that is pretty significant because that is saying ‘hey we're actually preparing for a pretty grim scenario’”

Laurie: Now, a quick technical note. France is warming faster than the global average, so the plan is looking at 4C in France, which equates to about 3C globally. But this is more than just a ‘grim scenario’. 4, even 3C is a level of climate change that, as we’ve heard many times throughout this series, would be catastrophic. Remember the Atlantic circulation that keeps Europe from freezing, the breakdown of which would decimate crops globally - well, that could have collapsed. Even without that, chaotic climate impacts in France and around the world would be disrupting its supply chains, destabilising geopolitics, sparking wars. The list goes on. So, claiming that France can live with 4C stretches credibility. And another reason is France’s record on adaptation today. Because the government hasn’t done enough to protect against current levels of climate change. Which will mean more deadly disasters, more failed promises, more anger … and more opportunities to derail climate action, and a greater risk of ending up at 4C. So, what’s going on? Why are governments failing to handle the risks of climate change today while making outlandish promises about doing so in the future? To understand, we need to go back, back to another moment in history when leaders claimed they were ready for the fallout from another global threat...

Chapter 3

Laurie: It’s early August 1982, a beautiful summer’s day in Washington DC. James Jones sits in front of a panel of politicians at the US Congress. He’s there to present a plan for delivering the mail after a nuclear war. James is the head of the planning division for the US Postal Service. His team makes sure the mail gets delivered no matter what happens. And nuclear war is one thing that could happen. Because the Cold War is hotting up. The US government is worried about a Soviet strike. To deter this, the government is investing in its nuclear arsenal, claiming that America can always return a devastating blow. And for that claim to be credible, the government has plans for society to carry on, even after a full-out nuclear attack - which includes delivering the mail. So, like governments today planning for 4C, James is contemplating the worst. His plan’s meticulous. Detailed hierarchies show how teams will be reconfigured if the Washington HQ is wiped out. There is an elaborate process for registering what he calls the ‘relocated population’, using change of address cards. The document runs to some 300 pages. But as James confidently wraps up, the congressmen are wide-eyed. The chairman breaks the silence. What if no one shows up to work? What if there aren’t any postal workers left? James says he doesn’t know the answer. And as the hearing goes on, it becomes clear the plan has never been tested. It assumes roads and railways would mostly survive. It expects small rural post offices to manage a national service when all the cities are gone. At one point an exasperated congressman exclaims ‘there’s just not going to be that many people left to read or write letters after the nuclear bombs explode’. One of James’s team steps in. ‘Those that are, will get their mail’. Things only got worse over the rest of the hearing, the plan unravelling. But to be fair to James and his hapless team, their plans were based on official government analysis. It said that the consequences of nuclear war wouldn’t be…that bad … One assessment even confidently said that the ‘United States could survive a nuclear attack and go on to recovery within a relatively few years’. Here’s an official film from the time, made by FEMA.

Archival: “…destructive as such an attack might be, we can survive; it would not mean the end of the world, the end of our nation…”

Laurie: But it all had a fatal flaw. The same flaw, in fact, that we heard in the last episode. Like climate risk assessments today, the government assessments of nuclear war used inaccurate assumptions. And like them, one of the biggest was to exclude the domino effects of the bombs.

Richard Turco: “…the original picture of a nuclear war was the bombs drop, the craters occurred. There's that damage. But then almost immediately afterwards, you can begin to rebuild.”

Laurie: That’s Richard Turco, a scientist who worked on the effects of nuclear war at the time. But the local impact of the bombs was only part of it. Their domino effects included vast fires that would blanket the Earth in smog, blocking sunlight, and dramatically cooling the world.

Richard Turco: “…the after-effects of the nuclear war would be like a nuclear winter…it would be difficult to well, to grow crops reliably. Billions of people could die in the process…regardless of where the bombs had actually fallen.”

Laurie:The central insight of nuclear winter was that the domino effects of nuclear war would be far more severe than the immediate blasts. So severe, they would destroy the delicate threads that held societies together. This documentary from the 80s set it out.

Archival: “…even if the harvests could continue, world trade would cease because of the destruction of ports and the world financial system…”

Laurie: When you realise this, then government plans for meaningfully preserving society - for delivering the mail - well, those plans are exposed for what they really are: a fantasy. And a similar thing is happening with climate change. Governments and companies have failed to reduce emissions fast enough. But they’ve also failed to prepare for the consequences. It’s now eminently possible that the world could hit the catastrophe of a 3, even 4C temperature rise. That brutal reality has pushed governments into making promises and plans for how they might protect people from this. But like those for nuclear war, these plans are based on assessments that exclude domino effects, tipping points, and just about all the things that make 4C un-survivable. When you include these, it’s clear that plans to live with 4C are also a fantasy. Which all begs the question: why is this happening?

Lee Clarke: "...if you're given the task to plan to respond to a calamitous event, you don't say, we can't do that. Your job is to do it.”

Laurie: That’s Lee Clarke, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rutgers University. He’s an expert in how governments claim to plan for catastrophes. They plan out of honest effort. Governments should think the unthinkable. It’s their job to protect societies, even from the very worst. But when the worst includes catastrophes like nuclear war or a 4C global temperature rise, there’s a problem …

Lee Clarke: “…there was no meaningful experience to draw on, no meaningful theories of social organization strategy or tactics, how to rebuild society. People don't have those answers.”

Laurie: But even so, governments are expected to have the answers. So, they make plans using guesses, assumptions, and simplistic projections. Lee calls these plans ‘fantasy documents’.

Lee Clarke: “Leaders very, very rarely say, ‘We can't really do anything about this’ ...They just don't say, ‘I don't know. We can't figure that out. We couldn't even, even in our wildest dreams with unlimited resources.’”

Laurie: But there’s another side to it. Fantasy documents might impact our ability to see the risks clearly. Whether on purpose or not, they can help justify the status quo, becoming mechanisms to keep things as they are. Because governments are themselves playing a role in increasing the risks of a catastrophe. By pursuing an aggressive nuclear stance in the 1980s. Or by not pursuing sufficiently rapid carbon reductions today. But they have to resolve the contradiction between their risky policies and the interests of their populations. So, if nuclear war can be survived – if it still means the mail can be delivered – then the status quo is justifiable. Dangerous nuclear stalemate can continue. More weapons can be built. Likewise, if societies can be adapted to 4C, then more fossil fuels can be burned. Societies don’t need transforming. Fossil fuel companies can continue to make vast profits. But if government plans were honest, admitting that these things might not be survivable, then it’s clear that people would want change. And that’s what happened in the Cold War, when by the mid-80s, films, songs, and activism exposed the ghastly gulf between the promises of protection and what would likely happen. Incredulity at the plans gave way to anger, reinvigorating the anti-nuclear movement. And as the Cold War ended, the world got better at managing the risks of nuclear catastrophe. Or at least until now …

Chapter 4

Laurie: But we haven’t seen the same thing with climate change. There’s of course a strong global climate movement, rightly focused on cutting emissions. And communities on the frontline of climate impacts have long called for more support from wealthier, high-emitting nations to help them adapt and to compensate for loss and damages driven by a problem that they didn’t cause. Yet in wealthy, powerful countries, there’s little public outrage at governments claiming they can keep people safe at 4°C - or at their failure to keep them safe now. Well…at least there wasn’t until events like the floods in Valencia, which have led to the opposite type of politics to what happened in the nuclear era, one that increases the risk of catastrophe. And that’s because climate change is different. It’s not a singular event that can be avoided, like nuclear war. Instead, it’s an era in which we now all live. The catastrophe is playing out. So, if governments keep failing to protect people — at home or abroad — the growing experience of this catastrophe will fuel mistrust and anger. And that can be exploited to derail climate action … which will push the world closer to 4°C. So, it’s clear that the era of fantasy plans and failed promises must end, that adaptation gaps must close. Like ships in a storm, societies must become more resilient to the impacts of climate change today so they can stay focused on navigating away from the chance of 4C tomorrow. But the critical question is what type of resilience can help societies hold the course?

Lisa Schipper: “…the reason why we're even vulnerable to climate change and need to adapt has to do with the political system that we live in, the way that society is structured, and all sorts of things like that.”

Laurie: That’s Professor Lisa Schipper, an expert in climate vulnerability and resilience at Bonn University in Germany. In a world above 1.5C, resilience isn’t just about being better prepared in the traditional sense of hardier infrastructure.

Lisa Schipper: “…it's about changing systems, it's about changing attitudes, it's about changing behaviours, really about fundamentally adjusting the way that we live in order to face and accept and be able to survive in the changing climate.”

Laurie: And recent events can give us an idea of what this kind of resilience could look like, of the design principles we can apply to society at large to better weather overshoot … Out of the fires in Los Angeles, as the smoke cleared, people spotted something remarkable …

Archival: “…amid rows of homes reduced to piles of ash by the Palisades fire stands a house that held out against the flames and smoke that scorched Northwest Los Angeles last week…”

Laurie: Down a street, in a whole neighbourhood completely destroyed by fire, one house survived. And it was built using a design called ‘passive house’. It makes buildings very energy efficient. They’re sealed, so the movement of temperature can be tightly controlled. A news report from the time explains what happened.

Archival: “It behaves different in a fire than a traditional house, where embers get sucked inside through roof vents. It is one of the reasons why we have seen homes in Los Angeles burning from the inside out, something the passive home seeks to prevent.”

Laurie: But the design didn’t just mean the house survived the fires. Before, it also needed far less heating and air conditioning. This saved its residents money on bills, improving their lives. And financial security can mean a more resilient household when disaster does strike. And another thing: less heating and air conditioning meant the house’s carbon emissions were lower. So, more resilient, better quality of life, and fewer carbon emissions. That’s a win-win-win. Here’s one of the family who lived in the house talking to local reporters.

Archival: “…we designed the house to be both fire resilient and sustainable and happily those two systems are often one and the same…”

Laurie: This goes beyond buildings. Similar design principles can be applied to societies at large. Because we need even more than resilient buildings to navigate the storm of 1.5 overshoot. Supply chains, economies, our behaviour, politics, relationships - all these things must become resilient like that LA house: safer from climate impacts, while also helping cut emissions and improving lives. That’s critical to how we can avoid climate consequences derailing climate action. If people feel safer now — not just in their homes but across society — mistrust and anger can be managed. That leaves less space for anti-climate forces to derail action, helping emissions fall even as societies experience a dramatic escalation in climate impacts. So, there’s a race on - a political race - over who can help people feel safe in the new climate reality of overshoot. The right kinds of solutions — those that also cut emissions — must win that race. The alternative could be a world of walls, wars, and 4°C. But more work is needed to identify all the ways this can be avoided. Because there is no credible plan to navigate what’s next and to win that political race. That’s the brutal truth as we face a world of overshoot, a truth we’ve explored throughout this series. And a key part of that plan has to touch on something deeper within ourselves, how we emotionally, philosophically, navigate overshoot. Because what’s coming next will be even harder: not just worsening disasters, but their domino effects destabilising societies. And even parts of nature crossing tipping points. As individuals and societies, we’ll have to emotionally navigate this new reality. This brings us back to where we started, back to the beginning of this series, back to the stories we tell ourselves and others about climate change. Because many of these are encouraging counterproductive fantasies. Fundamentally, this whole series has been about fantasies. The fantasy that we’re not in a new climate reality. The fantasy that technology will save us while we keep burning fossil fuels. The fantasy that overshooting 1.5 won’t be that bad. And in this episode, the fantasy that we can calmly plan for the worst and still carry on. As we’ve heard, some of these fantasies result from good intention and misguided action. But they’re also reinforced by malicious intent on the part of others, from those who wish to keep society - and their profits - as they are. But even that is a fantasy. Because going over 1.5C means everything will change; an unstable climate will see to that. The question is how to navigate this in a way that minimises suffering, rights wrongs, and avoids the very worst. And the only way that is possible is to stop living with fantasies. Like sailors who enter a storm. Certain mindsets do not equip the crew to navigate effectively, particularly mindsets of imminent salvation and utopia, or inevitable damnation and dystopia. But it’s understandable why, in discomfort and fear, we reach for these extremes. Here’s Rupert Read, co-director of the Climate Majority Project and a longtime climate activist.

Rupert Read: “…when things have gone wrong in the past, when we've been headed for a seeming catastrophe or dystopia, what people have often done in response is they've posited some kind of utopian alternative, some way that everything could turn out alright…”

Laurie: But it’s clear that a utopia isn’t going to happen. Or at least not for a while. And making unequivocal promises that say otherwise could - as the new reality comes bearing down - foster mistrust and anger. So, a utopian mindset might not be enough for overshoot. Similarly, dystopian mindsets are also powerful motivators, like during the Cold War, when the spectre of nuclear apocalypse was all too real. Imagining that future helped avoid it. But climate change is different. The chance to definitively avoid it has long passed, if it were ever possible. So, as things terrifyingly escalate, it could feel like dystopia is inevitable. And that could lead to despair and anger. Which is understandable, natural. But these emotions could be disabling, undermining climate action, or be exploited to derail. So, binary mindsets of win/lose, utopia/dystopia might not help us navigate overshoot. We need a different mindset, one that charts a way between these extremes.

Rupert Read: “So what is it to have a credible way through the storms that are coming? It is to have a picture of how we go into those storms together, transformatively adapted to the damage that is coming and the worst damage that will follow…having a gritty, credible path that can take us through what is coming.”

Laurie: Rupert Read calls that a ‘thru-topia’. Because if it’s not full utopia or full dystopia that might not reliably motivate us anymore, it might be something in between, something about navigating through. Which can of course include shades of both. And these are similar to the kinds of stories told by people from communities that have experienced dislocation and disaster for centuries, who’ve long been in the storm - and to whom the rest of the world is now catching up. One example is the island of Rapa Nui, which some call Easter Island. In episode 1, we heard one popular story about the island, that the historical Rapa Nui people shortsightedly overused their resources, driving their society to collapse. This seems to offer a guide for our current moment. But it’s not true. The real story is that global economic forces pushed Europeans to brutally exploit the Rapa Nui and the island, causing a catastrophe. This story is more pertinent for today, with global rules allowing powerful interests to distract and delay climate action. But these are still predominantly Western-mediated stories. Instead, perhaps it’s the mindset of the Rapa Nui themselves that we can learn most from for what comes next. Because their perspective is almost entirely missing from the Western-told stories of the island. Here’s Hetereki Huke, a Rapa Nui architect and researcher.

Hetereki Huke: “We almost faced extinction. There was a moment in history that there were only 110 of us remaining in Rapa Nui. And we navigated that.”

Laurie: For the Rapa Nui, the dystopia in many ways did come. Yet they navigated it. Now, I’m not arguing that something similarly extreme will happen to the whole world. But things will get worse. And as that happens, we might pay attention to the approach that Hetereki talks about, one we might think of as ‘thrutopian’ - which he calls a ‘genealogical approach’.

Hetereki Huke: “Having a genealogical approach means that you embody every one single person that was before you. And you are committed to every one single person coming after you. So in a certain way, it takes you apart from your current reality and forces you to live in a more historical approach.”

Laurie: This is a mindset in which society isn’t seen as individual losses and gains but instead as a collective, working together not just in the moment but through time.

Hetereki Huke: “Maybe I won't fulfill every single expectation that I have of myself. Maybe I won't reach or I won't succeed in every single endeavor that I can see during my life. But I can have faith that through the next generations, we will strive.”

Laurie: We’ve met this mindset throughout the series. It was partly with future generations in mind that the low-lying islands fought for the 1.5C goal. It was her love for her grandchildren that drove Sue to ask awkward questions of her pension fund. It is our collective responsibility to people and planet through time that makes fairness the critical issue, not just morally for climate change generally, but for the practical project of navigating the overshoot storm. Because leaving communities who did little to cause climate change to suffer its worst impacts - or leaving younger and future generations a greater and greater carbon sucking burden - won’t just be unbearable but could create the instability and resentment that truly derails the world from avoiding the worst. And the intergenerational principle is apparent in the Rapa Nui approach to dealing with the impacts of climate change on the island today.

Hetereki Huke: “The land is not just land, it's something else. It's something that it was given to you, that you have the honor to be part of, that is intertwined with your own genealogies …It's you, it's your ancestor and it's been in. It's been with you since ever, way before you arrived to that land.”

Laurie: So, more than anything, it is this mindset - taken globally - that’s needed to navigate the figurative and literal storm of 1.5C overshoot. There is no denying this storm. This is no easy way out of this storm. The world will not exit it anytime soon. That’s our reality. But it is not a counsel of despair. It is something to face and to navigate. So, alongside the grief, as the fires rage and the fear grows, we need stories of focus and struggle, justice and hope as we head into this next phase, battening down the hatches with an unshakable resolve to fight for a future against the lashing fury of this storm.

Hetereki Huke: “We act in history. We act in time.

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